These fragments I have shored against my ruin.

Scoops From the Tide Pools

Writers influenced by John Ashbery more often imitate his manner than
grasp his import. They scramble a metaphor, write a melting close, insert
pop icons, make a comic allusion - but the essence of Ashbery doesn't lie
in these tricks. When I read in 1992, with instant delight, Mark Ford's
Landlocked, I found a poet who had internalized the inner, more than the
outer, Ashbery. What does the American Ashbery offer the English Ford in
the way of moral and stylistic example? And how does Ford's poetry, even
while benefiting from Ashbery's, attain its own different allure, both in
Landlocked - his only published volume to date - and in the many poems
published since?

Ashbery's moral importance, for Ford and other younger poets, lies in
his being the first notable American poet to free himself from nostalgia
for earlier religious, philosophical and ideological systems. Or, to be
more precise, he includes systems and creeds in his general nostalgia for
everything from sunsets to Popeye. In Ashbery's work, a comedy of
plenitude and inception, both in theme and language, is constantly - and
effortlessly - cancelling out the general wash of nostalgia. Ashbery
places himself wholly in the secular world.

Stylistically, Ashbery's poetry reproduces what he calls - in the
beautiful prose poem "Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are" - "not the
infamous 'still, small voice' (of conscience) but an ancillary speech that
is parallel to the slithering of our own doubt-fleshed imaginings, a
visible soundtrack of the way we sound". By this form of speech, he
confirms a psychology that is not vertical - addressed to a Platonic
standard - but horizontal, slithering unstably around on the human plane.
And Ashbery avoids ringing closure (though lingering closure pervades his
volumes). He is more likely to start up a new poem in the last several
lines of the old than to let the old come to a complete halt. Often he
closes with a pratfall of anticlimax occluding the ever-present, if often
comically presented, Ashbery pain. "Aloof, smiling and courteous", like
life in "Haunted Landscape", this poet who admires everything and wonders
at nothing babbles on, naivete and sophistication his changes of garments.
There is a persistent sense of plot aborted, of journeys on circular
tracks, of aspiration engaged in and mocked, of synapses of allusion
constantly making electrical sparks and then fizzling out. Human meaning
is made and exploded, and no large systematic backdrop of action or belief
guarantees either its fittingness or its permanence.

Is this what life feels like in Mark Ford's rendering? As I read Ford,
I answer both "Yes" and "No". Yes, there are deliberately parodic and
inconsequential moments, and yes, there are forms of suffering, usually
understated, subtending the comic anticlimax. But while Ashbery tends to
write within explicitly human terms, and to be continually "incoherent" in
exposition, Ford is more allegorical; he can be a "misguided angel" (the
phrase is the title of a recently published poem) or a "huge green
amphibian", who, in "Outing", follows his girlfriend as she shops:

If only
it were truly impossible, and less like being a huge green amphibian
made to inch my home-sick coils between the different counters
of your favourite store, taking all these fancy cautions
to keep my head down, and out of other shoppers' way

. . . .

Now as I glide towards the whirr of sliding doors, I half-hope
its
electric eye won't respond to my irregular approach. Another
spanking
clean threshold! "Open Sesame," it cries, "Hold tight!"

The cliched cries, "Open
Sesame" from The Arabian Nights, and "Hold tight" from The Waste Land,
exhibit the tag-ridden overload of the Ashberian literary synapse, but the
film of the self as a homesick alligator about to evade the high-placed
electronic sensor of the automatic doors has more fairy-tale jollity and
more consistency of plot than is natural to Ashbery. Ford's lyrics tend to
depend, as Ashbery's do not, on a storyline, frequently an absurd and
allegorical one. In "A Swimming-Pool Full of Peanuts", for instance, Ford
creates a perfect mimicry of the absurd medieval trial, the protagonist
rising to a furious zeal in an attempt to discover what secret lies hidden
under the innumerable peanuts; but the knight of the swimming pool, in lieu
of finding victory, succumbs ingloriously to collapse. Such a parabolic
poem - applicable to all the deranged and deranging strivings of youth to
make sense of the confounding world - aims to make us believe entirely in
its frustration, while disbelieving its lunatic story.

Ford's more recent poetry is less indebted to the Ashberian comic, but
continues to practice the silent Ashberian undermining of the ground one
stands on. The "Discordant Data" - to quote the title of a recent Ashbery
poem dedicated to Ford - will not add up. Even so, the frustrating wish to
create order persists: as Ford puts it in "Living with Equations", "As I
emerged from my hip-bath it suddenly dawned / The facts might be
remarshalled and shown to rhyme"(TLS, December 12, 1997). But the poem comes
to grief in a very Ashberian way: after the time of equations has lapsed,
The remainder can only imperceptibly dwindle, retreating Backwards until
their long lost premises turn inside out.

The avoidance of the comic, the tragic, the sublime and the just in
such an ending places it in exactly the aesthetic of human scale defined
by Ashbery.

Yet there is one central practice of Ford that differentiates him
strongly from Ashbery. Ford includes in his writing a physically sensuous
documentation that is not present in the ever-theatrical Ashbery of the
virtual world. One could say that Wordsworth and Hopkins, with their sense
of skin against wind, breath against earth, lie behind the moments of
natural presence we come across in Ford. Although the poem "Penumbra"
includes an Ashberian bon mot - that one man's loss is another man's
devastation - we find that Ford brackets the Ashberian dark comedy with
bleak scenic passages:

I lean into the wind that blows
Off the lake, and
scours the sodden fields; the sky's
Reflections ripple between ruts and
bumps

. . . .

Crops,
Sludge, restless drifts of leaves absorb
The haggard light.

In his grasp of natural metaphors for the de-pressive moods of the
body, Ford belongs to the line of British poets - from Shakespeare to Ted
Hughes - who are willing to describe nature in its unlovely moments; but
he differs from them in allowing the reflections arising from such moments
to take on Ashberian inconsequence and comedy.

Ford is also more likely than Ashbery to set himself in a recognizable
location or a stable incident. Where Ashbery is protean, an absent centre
through which all discourses move, Ford lets us see a speaker irritated
(in a poem called "Plan Nine") by "the dreadful telephone again", facing
in the morning a super whose "reign of terror / And mind like glue" are
relentlessly present. Horrible twentieth-century prescriptions for good
living are imposed on a "case" resembling, we are sure, the poet's own, as
a "caustic voice" says to "a clutch of bright-eyed interns", "No mohair,
no alcohol, / Lots of plain yogurt certainly, no foreign languages, no
tete-a-tetes" (TLS, November 29, 1996). The parodic mockery of medical
discourse suggests Ford's debt to Ashbery, yet such a passage is located
closer to a life-plot than Ashbery's work tends to be.

In a review for the TLS, Ford once praised in James Tate qualities that
can be found in his own work: the "refusal to elide the illogic of
experience", the "treacherous instability" of meditation, and the way in
which poems work by "collaging disparate materials into a seamless
fluency" (TLS, August 29, 1997). The kind of lyricism that Ford finds in
Tate - one both "intimate and impersonal" - is one he desires, I think,
for himself. In rendering the poem intimate though impersonal, Ford is
closer to Hart Crane than to Ashbery:

There is no controlling
One's
renegade thoughts, nor striking the fetters
From blistered limbs.
Inflexible etiquette demands
Every gesture be also a memory: you stare
Into space where fractions and figures still pursue
Their revenge.

Crane's verse, as Ford said in a review of Crane's Selected Letters,
was
motivated by the poet's "need to embody the physical, the mundane, the
fleeting" (TLS, September 19, 1997). Whereas the mundane and the fleeting
are amply present in Ashbery, the physical is less so. Ford is most himself
when he grafts a physical instress on the Ashberian comic, and a firm
allegorical storyline on the aslant angle of vision. A recent Ford poem,
"Twenty Twenty Vision" (LRB, March 19, 1998), remarking centrally that "my
doom is never to forget / My lost bearings", opens in a mode learned from
Ashbery:

Unwinding in a cavernous bodega he suddenly
Burst
out: Barman,
these tumblers empty themselves
And yet I persist.

Yet, very shortly, "Twenty Twenty Vision" turns into a marvellous lyric
autobiography, reminiscent by turns of Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot and Crane,
but dominated by no single influence. The fact that we can read such an
oblique poem with understanding is due to Ford's predecessors in modernism,
including Ashbery. But the memorable lyric itself - its storyline, its
alternately understated and overstated emotional vicissitudes, its surreal
scenic vividness - is all Ford's own. Here are its last nine unsettling, if
intermittently ironic, lines:

A pair of hungry owls
Saluted the arrival of
webby darkness; the dew
Descended upon the creeping ferns. At first
My
sticky blood refused to flow, gathering instead
In wax-like drops and pools:
mixed with water and a dram
Of colourless alcohol it thinned and reluctantly
Ebbed away. I lay emptied as a fallen
Leaf until startled awake by a
blinding flash
Of dry lightning, and the onset of this terrible thirst.

In an interview with Graham Bradshaw (in Talking Verse, edited by
Robert Crawford et al, reviewed in the TLS, March 1, 1996), Ford
repudiated the literal autobiographical poem:

I can't bear poems about
grandfathers, or fishing expeditions, or what it's like to move into a new
house, unless they're very very good poems . . . . I start off prejudiced
against them because I find the subject matter so boring . . . . I guess
basically I'm always looking for gaps, little fissures where "a thought
might grow", to use Derek Mahon's phrase.

I associate the literal lyric with the United States, in which recently
it has been argued that specification of gender, ethnicity, class and
family relations adds authenticity to a poem. The classic lyric, on the
other hand, the lyric from which Ford derives, engaged in various sorts of
despecification so as to make its voice assumable by many readers.
Originally, the generalized speaker was - by an invisible convention -
expected to pursue his thoughts along normal logical lines. Ezra Pound,
Eliot, Marianne Moore and Crane, by allowing more wayward associations
into lyric, created a modernism that curved the rails of thought. Then
Ashbery, the disciple of Rimbaud and Mallarme, dared actually to remove
sections of the rails themselves, leaving in their place a barely visible
dotted line.

The enthralling thing about Ford's lyrics is that though he has adopted
the newer techniques of curves and gaps in "looping the loop" of
consciousness (the phrase is one he used for a title), he has allowed them
to remain unexpectedly hospitable to the old - not in the Ashberian mode
of knowing allusion, but in the way of kinesthetic sense-memory. As he
said in the interview with Graham Bradshaw - using a metaphor for
tradition that might have surprised Eliot but not Wordsworth or Hopkins -
"You scoop up a bucketful and enjoy as much as you can the various
life-forms that happen to be in it". We have the stimulus of watching Ford
scooping up, from the tide-pools of both America and England, the life
forms and language forms of the 1990s. The poetic exchange-system in which
these life forms participate is one of "the circulation of small
largenesses", in which the ordinary pains and elations of human life
accrete, when examined and described in poetry, into sums of believable,
and large, moral and imaginative consequence.

This essay is an edited version of a paper given at a recent conference in
London on Anglo-American poetic relations, and is reprinted on this
website without permission.